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AI used by police cannot tell Black people apart and other reasons Canada’s AI laws need urgent attention

theconversation.com AI used by police cannot tell Black people apart and other reasons Canada’s AI laws need urgent attention

Two new laws with major implications for how AI is used in society are being considered in Canada. Both lack protections for the public from the harms of AI, including racial profiling by police.

AI used by police cannot tell Black people apart and other reasons Canada’s AI laws need urgent attention

In Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and other policing agencies, including the Toronto Police Service and the Ontario Provincial Police, have already been called out by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada for using the Clearview AI technology to conduct mass surveillance.

Clearview AI has a database of over three billion images that were collected without consent by scraping the internet. Clearview AI matches faces from the database against other footage. This violates Canadian privacy laws. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has critiqued RCMP use of this technology and the Toronto Police Services suspended use of that product.

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